OMG!! Please help: possible to salvage a laptop HDD using my desktop PC????

[mavis]

Hello everybody, have an emergency I was hoping you could help me with ...

I just set up my new rig and was trying to install a Bluetooth dongle on my wife's ANCIENT Win98 laptop ... anyway, the Bluetooth drivers JACKED her laptop up BADLY, now it won't even boot, there's a problem with explorer.exe. I think it is pretty much beyond repair, which leaves only salvaging as an option.

My question is, can I somehow connect her laptop's HDD to my computer, hide it during boot (since it has it's own MBR) and then access its files from within WinXP Pro on my PC? Please say yes, she is freaking out over losing about 5 years worth of pics and documents which are irreplaceable ... I just need to know if I can plug her laptop's HDD into my mobo somehow (as a slave drive or whatever) and access its files from WinXP ...

thanks / mavis

 

[Tabula Rasa]

Dont think so... First youl have to get it out... which is a problem on its own most of the times... then as far as i know the connections are different ( not a standard ide cable ).

Can you boot using a boot disk?
if you can... get an old version of NC and run it on both of the comps... get a serial cable (0-0) and link them copy whatever you can.. than format the poor thing.

 

[XP Abuser]

bet you wish you had 2 partitions. i had the same prob with me old comp had a packard bell well windows crapped up and i had a mega amount of data on it and had 1 partition and was supplied with a recovery cd which formats the hd decided to buy a new hdd cuz i couldnt afford to lose everything so get a new hard drive if theres room for expansion install win 98 and setup 2 partitions for 1 physical disk (u probably know that) and use the old one as data storage cuz if the datas that important to her its well worth it!!!

 

[jcs83md]

If you can manage to get the hard drive out of the laptop there is a cable which allows you to hook up a laptop harddrive and a desktop harddrive on the same cable. I have done it before, and used a partition copy program to copy the laptop information to a standard desktop hard drive.

However, I do not know what the cables are called. I would do a search on laptop harddrive adapter or something of that nature, but rest assured this does exist. If you can find it.

 

[Zedric]

If you have a CD-drive to boot from you can use a Linux dist that runs directly off the CD (there are some, ISO Linux I believe is one). Then you can FTP the files if you want. Alot faster and easier than serial links.

 

[Geffy]

Yes you can, I think.

Get Easy Recovery Professional 6 from http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
or
DataRecovery from http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/

Then install the software and make an Emergency Diskette.
You can then recover to another physical disk, network drive, removable drive or floppy.

If you are in DOS I am not sure how you will get any network, or something like that, you may have to use Floppies, but it can be recovered. If you can get onto the net with the laptop then you can have all of the files put onto an FTP site. You could even have it FTP the files onto your XP machine if you had an FTP server on the XP machine.

Hope this helps.

 

[Geffy]

Just checked the prices,
$199 for DataRecovery and $499 for the full thing. I am glad, I keep backups.

 

[gonaads]

If you can open up the Lap Top find the IDE connector at the MoBo (If it's long enough). Open the Case on your PC and connect the IDE Cable from the Lap Top HD into the secondary IDE Controller on the MoBo in your PC and reboot. It should just boot up. If not, shut down and use a Win 98 Boot Disk and go to a DOS Prompt within your PC, go into FDISK and remove the Make C: Bootable thingy and reboot (remove the Boot Disk First). I think you can do that. And since you're booting with a Win98 Boot Disk you would only see the Lap Top HD unless you formatted your XP HD in your PC to FAT32.

(If anyone reading this knows otherwise please instruct before he tries this)

 

[lurker2100]

I know you're in Japan, but at least you can see what the laptop hard drive adapters look like that jcs83md mentioned:
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108

If you can get your hands on one of those, you can then plug your wife's laptop hard drive right into your dekstop machine. If you plug it in on the secondary channel, or as the slave to your boot drive, you shouldn't have to worry about your machine trying to boot off of it. Hope this helps.

 

[Geffy]

actually now that I remember takin my old Laptop apart, you could try removin the drive from the laptop. I think it should have a standard IDE port on the back, then all you got to do is find out how to make it a slave, or put it as the master on your secondary IDE port on your MoBo.

I think that will work.

 

[Nick M]

That depends I would say. I had a TINY Toshiba Libretto laptop before, and that died, so I took it apart, and the harddrive was weird, most likely because the laptop was so small. I hope its not a smaller then standard laptop. What Gonnads said should work, and if in the worst case, it doesn't, I'm sure you can find that harddrive adapter thing in Japan.

 

[mavis]

wow, thanks for all the great advice, everybody!!

It looks like I will be buying one of those adaptors, and hooking this thing up as a secondary drive on my main rig. I don't really care about the OS (fixing the Win98 install on the laptop) and hopefully I'll just be able to pull all of the data I need off the drive, and copy it to my rig's HDD ...

I'll post back here in a week or so when I can actually get that adaptor ... Thanks for all your advice!! I really appreciate it (and so will she, I'm sure)!!

mavis

 

[djmgyx]

Intresting the number of responses that immediaitley jumpted to formating the Laptop drive. I can understand conencting the laptop to your desktop MOBO, but as u've seen it requires a aspecialized adapter. I ran into the issue smyself and picked one up at Fry's Electornics In the us for about $15, u can check on www.outpost.com to see if they have it avaiable there. But then again that is if u can't fix the laptop. Have u tried booting off the Win98 boot disk, if u can, then the rest is easy, and there are several ways to go about it.

1) Copy exploere from another system onto hers, in essence the same thaing has replacing a hacked verison when editing icons and everythign else that's been posted here. (should be small enough to fit on a floppy). Then fdisk the master boot record and see if that helps. reboot and see if u can even read the drives contents

2) If that still fails and u have room on her HD, copy the cab files for win98 onto her drive and run setup again, installing into the same directory as her existing program. be sure to move anyhting kept in her mydoc folder or any other user based profile folder to another universal directory under the c drive, as these are likely to b overwritten.

3) If she has a NIC, install the DOS drivers for the nic from a boot cd, share the drive out and read it via LAN on ur desktop, backing up whatever you need.

4) If all else fails, and ther's no recourse I agree with everyone else, put the poor thing out of it's memory. But if your wife was anything like some of the girls I know, who've had years of stuff wiped out. Format it, install an OS, leave a Love you note and run for the hills, until the fire goes out.

 

[gonaads]

AND BACK UP NEXT TIME!!!

 

[Geffy]

got to agree with Gonaads on that one

 

[mavis]

Originally posted by gonaads
AND BACK UP NEXT TIME!!!

No doubt!

I'm actually planning on buying her a new laptop for Chrsitmas, this time it'll be running WinXP and I will make sure to get one with a built in burner - I ALWAYS back my rig up - I think I would seriously break down in tears if I lost all 600 mp3s and 100 full length music videos, not to mention my icons, themes, and graphics. Oh and my pr0n. lol

Anyway, the problem has been that I couldn't really do much with her laptop because it's so old, it's EXTREMEMLY picky about drivers and hardware, so there was never really a way to back it up. At least now I can put it out of it's misery!!



mavis

 

[Nick M]

And your porn! oh my. oh my. Don't let your wife see that...!

PS. I love old hardware, it's so fun to tinker with twist your mind over

 

[Taurus]

haha... i love old hardware, too.

friend of mine knew someone with a junkyard which had a pile of old computers. he went there and took all the parts he wanted... not knowing what anything really was. i went to his house and amongst the rubble spotted a video card! and it was agp! and had a fan! i was quite curious to play with it.

ended up being an original riva tnt which i put some arctic silver 3 and a new hsf on. my friends and i still use it whenever like one of our video cards goes out or something. it can do counter-strike at 30-60fps.

i'm gonna keep it til i'm 70 and show my grandkids and try to explain what "sdram" and an "agp slot" is. then they'll tell their dad that "grampa is mumbling nonsense again..!", thinking i can't hear or understand them. }:\

 

[Nick M]

A junkyard with a pile of computers. Oh that's awsome. I do that too. My friend, she had three boxes of computer parts in her attic, old old things, like, I'm holding somekind of PCI card, whatever it is, brand new, with a box that says made in 1982 on it. I took everything that was in the attic. I have all these computer parts, I don't know what they are, but, they make me happy Playing around with new old parts rocks. I agree with you, you never know what you might find. You know what I really want? A really old MAC, or an really really ancient IBM box. Or a monochrome laptop. That would make me so happy. God, computers are so cool. BTW Taurus I love the " show my grandkids and try to explain what "sdram" and an "agp slot" is. then they'll tell their dad that "grampa is mumbling nonsense again..!" thing, that's really funny. Someone once made a joke about me, that I'm going to be older and married, and my little kid is going to say after dinner " Mommy, can I help daddy take the computer apart? " lol .

PS. Mavis, forgive me for taking the thread off topic, but, it's irresistable. old computer stuff awsome. hope you understand.

 

[Taurus]

mavis won't mind... he'll get back in the thread once he gets that laptop hd adapter and hooks it up.

haha. my kids will probly think i'm a big dork. i doubt they'll wanna help me take apart computers.

hey, that old card you have... if it's that old, it's most likely an ISA card... predecessor to pci. i would say find a board with an isa slot (mine actually has one) and play with it... but maybe you should keep it in the box and preserve it..? could very well be worth money some day in the far future.. or at least an interesting conversation piece.

and i'd love to have a 10-year old laptop, too... weighs like 15 pounds and has a 6" monochrome screen. not sure what i would do with it, besides take it apart. it could run qbasic programs.